The invention relates to an apparatus for holding and for unwinding coils of tape-like or wire-like material.
Cassettes and manipulators for coils of tape-like or wire-like material are known and commonly used in a very wide range of embodiments. Known coil cassettes are generally designed for "just-in-time" production, i.e. a coil is stored in the cassette and fed to a processing machine, for example a press; there, part of the wound tape or wire is pulled off. The cassette with the partially used or unwound coil is then returned to a storage rack. Such coils and storage methods for coils are disclosed, for example, in the following publications: German Auslegeschrift 2,842,448, German Offenlegungsschrift 3,435,215, 3,417,130 and 2,639,427 and EP-A1-267357.
Since the known cassettes are designed having unwinding and storage apparatuses, for example for vertical storage and withdrawal of the tape material, they must be designed to be stable enough to perform the task. The space requirement for such cassettes is correspondingly large and the cassettes are complicated and expensive to produce. Furthermore, the cassettes generally follow the outer configuration of the coil, i.e. they are circular and correspondingly difficult to manipulate and to store.